There was a house in New Orleans

  New Orleans, Louisiana
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Welcome to the Home of American Jazz!!! This town rocks! (in a jazzy way). Where New York is the home of theatre, LA movies, and Vegas casinos, New Orleans is music lovers heaven!!



Here  we started a 13 day Contiki Tour of the East Coast of USA.   After re-locating rooms and pigging out of a free breaky,we explored this amazing world where clarinets and trumpets can play as one, without cat fights!!  Bourbon St was a mixture of  mardi gras, strippers, tourist junk, pubs  and music.



We sampled the local cuisine of "Gumbo" (Seafood broth with sausage and rice) and "poboy" (big crusty sub), and yummy pancakes sprinkled with icing sugar ("powdered sugar").  New Orleans is still affected by Katrina, as a lot of the tours and shops were still closed,and internet connections were dodgy.

In the afternoon we met out Contiki group for the first time.  48 young people, 40 of whom were aussies!   We drove out to the Louisanna swamps for a scary sunset airboat ride, and fed the ALIGATORS marshmellows?!?!?!!!!! (they liked 'em!) They also liked Aussie Joel, who tried to kiss a baby aligator and ended up with it's teath through his lips in return!!!











Dinner was at "Bubba Gump's Shrimp Co." where we learnt that Forest Gump would be our best friend during the whole tour!  Dad re-named it the Forest Gump tour!



That night after our 10pm dinner, we checked out the night life, promptly got bored with the pub and wandered onto the street for a taste of real live New Orleans dixie!! The best night of our trip! (Watch our videos to check out the JD swiggin' street corner band!)  We listened to them for about 2 hours!!









The next morning we departed New Orleans way too early,and "rolled on" to the beautiful beach town of Pensacola.